Sunday, June 28, 2009

I stopped by the Unreal Admin Page today, something I rarely do anymore. Somehow, one thing led to another and I bumbled across the NaliWeaponsIIX package. Evidently it's been around for about five years, but it was new to me so I figured what the heck - give it a shot.

After all, I haven't done anything new and exciting with the servers in a long time.

So I put it on BITCH House.

Does anybody play UT2004 anymore?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Anyway, I stumbled across my cdkey while looking through some old files on the Proxy Project system and found out what I was doing wrong. I'd bring it online if there was any interest, but the truth is no one really played it much when it was "popular".

Alien Arena

I have found this game mildly amusing. Even bothered to recompile it for AMD64, so it can go on the new box any time. I played it online a couple of times but there was not much action on the few servers that were out there.

EXP IV Move

This didn't make much difference, although one thing definitely improved. Before the move any network activity caused the system to report high (90%) network utilization. Now it's dropped down to something like "normal". Still, it didn't help.

However, dicking around with the system today I happened to notice the "hinky" account (that's me) was getting flooded with email from the cron process, causing disk utilization to hit the roof.

It made no sense. It was cron activity from root, and nowhere in root's config or in crontab was there any directive to send email to "hinky"! This is not the first time I've had issues with email filling the disk up and I thought I had it hammered. Now, it's fixed (famous last words) and nobody is getting any email at all on the system.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

The EXP IV box used to be the longest link on HinkyNet. I had a very long ethernet cable from the Old Days (1995 or 1996) that I used to link it in. The said cable spent many years in the trunk of the Hinkymobile and was used as an emergency measure back in my consultant days, which are now almost ten years behind us.

As a result of the use, abuse, and neglect of this cable, it was quite kinky and probably not a good choice to put "in production". And since I'm a Cheap Sun of a Bitch I was damned if I'd go out and actually buy a decent cable for this purpose.

So I moved the whole damned box across the room, as well as the UPS. I put it on a cable that is about six inches away from being too short. Hopefully this tightens up the whole "collision domain" and complaints of LAG will, if not disappear, be minimized.